


in the end, i'll pull the trigger

by zebra (statusquo_ergo)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Branching Timelines, Hallucinations, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Psychological Drama, Suicidal Thoughts, Surrealism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-07-18 06:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 20,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7304014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/zebra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are good days, in which time flows normally, new things are new and surprising things are surprising, and there are bad days, in which time flows with an overlap, new things are old and surprising things are cliché. Déjà vu days, sometimes whole weeks or months he’s mostly lived through already.</p><p>On those days, every decision John makes feels important.</p><p>They probably aren’t.</p><p>(If you strain your ears, the words of the sage will reach you somewhere between intuition and science.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. nostalgic scenery

“You have an old soul, John.”

Whenever they say that, they smile as though this is both a good thing and a bad one, something to be praised and something to be pitied. John doesn’t know what it means, exactly, or how adults seem to have a universal understanding of this complicated idea and a universal agreement not to explain it to him, but whatever it is, they treat him differently because of it; he’s smarter than the other children, able to understand things they can’t. He fits into worlds he shouldn’t, has room to move in spaces reserved for other sorts of people.

His life is comprised of many moving pieces.

Sometimes in his dreams, he’s a kaleidoscope.

\---

John has a sister called Harriet who goes by “Harry” and likes to tell her friends that her brother is prophetic. The first time John overhears, he mistakes the word for “pathetic” and interrupts that she’s a wanker, so she punches him; it takes a little while to sort out the situation, but then John looks up “prophetic” in the dictionary and figures it’s okay, even if it’s not quite true. He tried to explain it to her once, but not very well, and he forgives her for not understanding.

There are good days, in which time flows normally, new things are new and surprising things are surprising, and there are bad days, in which time flows with an overlap, new things are old and surprising things are cliché. Déjà vu days, sometimes whole weeks or months he’s mostly lived through already.

On those days, every decision he makes feels important.

They probably aren’t.

\---

One night, the 29th of January, John lies in bed and stares at the ceiling as he remembers a day several years in the future when he will be shot in the shoulder during a combat mission in Afghanistan. The terrain is sandy and the sun is hot, and it hurts to breathe, and all he’s asking is for God to please let him live.

Vowing to never join the military under any circumstances or for any reason, John tries to will himself to sleep.

_But this is important._

Some decisions are bigger than others.

\---

When John is fifteen, his mother sits him down and snaps that he needs to give up on his fucking dream of becoming a doctor because it’s never going to happen, and she knows he’s just trying to make her feel guilty because she and his father can’t pay for him to go to university. He snaps back that maybe they could if she didn’t drink so much of their money away, and at least he _has_ a dream, dammit, what has _she_ ever done?

Then his father hits him for screaming too loudly, and he leaves before they can kick him out.

In the twilight, he walks slowly with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground and thinks about the choices he’s made.

A black rabbit hops across his path, fixing him with its big red eyes.

Many good things are started accidentally.

\---

In the end, it makes the most sense to join the military for any number of reasons, so John does. For one thing, it pays for him to attend St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, which isn’t exactly close to the rehabilitation clinic he shoves Harry into but is close enough for him to drop by most weekends.

The astronaut at the front desk waves him in and John taps the counter on his way to the visitors’ room.

“So,” he says when Harry sits across from him, folding her hands on the tabletop. “How’s it going?”

She scoffs and rolls her shoulders back. “It’d be going a lot better if there was anything to do here.”

John smiles, looking down at his lap. “Are you making progress?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

They have almost the same conversation every time he comes to see her. Once, she said she’d made a friend, but then Harry got a little better and the other girl didn’t and suddenly Harry’s new friend was the worst person she’d ever met; John hasn’t heard about her since. By now, she must have been kicked out of the program. Maybe she’s dead.

“Do you think you are?”

Harry laughs tersely. “Sure.”

John decides to believe her, even though he doesn’t know if it’s true.

They chat aimlessly for another few minutes before she has to meet with her case manager. He kisses her on the cheek, a habit from years past, and she scuffs her heels a little as she walks away; John watches her go and thinks wearily about all the lab work waiting for him back at Barts.

“She won’t last long on the outside.”

His hackles raise at the assertion, maybe because who is this arrogant stranger stepping in to make claims about his sister, and what does he know, what right does he have. Maybe because it’s a fear he’s harbored for awhile that there will never be any recovery for her from this, that all his efforts will be in vain no matter what. Maybe because he couldn’t solve the problem on his own a long time ago, even before it started.

He shouldn’t engage.

“What makes you say that?”

You know her, John, you know she’s barely hanging on.

“You know her, John, you know she’s barely hanging on.”

John clenches his left hand into a fist, nails biting into his palm. This again.

“Do I know you?”

The man smirks, falling into Harry’s vacated chair.

“I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Sherlock, John realizes abruptly. This is Sherlock.

“The name is Sherlock Holmes.”

True.

“John Watson.”

Sherlock quirks his brow, folds his arms across his chest.

“I’m aware.”

Simultaneously, John is frozen in place and pulled in all directions; how does he— Could he be— Do they maybe— Is this the—

“Harry is your sister, obviously,” Sherlock explains without prompting, “your unattached sister, given that you’re the only visitor she’s had thus far, so ‘Watson’ isn’t a married name; and surely you’re aware that she referred to you multiple times over the course of your little… _chat._ John. I’d’ve been a fool to miss it.”

No. No, of course not.

This is both for the best and a terrible disappointment (not that the two have ever been mutually exclusive).

“What are you in for?” John asks as he reclaims his seat, because if they’re going to be brazen, then they’re going to be brazen. Sherlock smiles as though he appreciates the candor.

“I have a list.”

John has a feeling that Sherlock is a very important decision.

\---

A slight increase in the number of John’s visits to the clinic is the direct result of his introduction to Sherlock. (Correlation does not imply causation.) His chats with Harry remain brief and are occasionally perfunctory, but Sherlock is always in the visitors’ lounge even though he never seems to have any visitors of his own, and he never makes John feel like he’s wasting his time.

Sherlock is perpetually bored by life and everything in it; John thinks he’s too smart for his own good, and everything about him is fascinating.

“I would think you’d want to get out of here, do something more with your life,” John muses one day, and Sherlock laughs.

“Remaining here is the simplest way to keep my overbearing brother off my back,” he says. “I could get myself discharged at any time, obviously.”

To Sherlock, most things are obvious. Sometimes, John agrees.

“You mean you can get yourself clean whenever you want?” John asks, even though he’s reasonably sure it doesn’t work that way.

“Oh, John,” Sherlock says fondly, “you’ve studied dependence. Surely you know that no one deceives like an addict in need of a fix.”

It’s probably true that if anyone is capable of lying their way out of rehab, it’s Sherlock.

“Don’t they have someone monitoring these conversations?” John asks. Sherlock smirks.

“You’re learning.”

\---

Two weeks later, when John visits Harry at the clinic, Sherlock isn’t in the visitors’ room. Discharged, the nurses explain, though if you aren’t family we really shouldn’t be telling you these things.

The trip feels more or less pointless.

\---

John has always known that finishing his degree meant deployment to Afghanistan. It wasn’t a condition of his enrollment, exactly, more of a warning, and he took it in stride because he knows enough to be grateful for all he’s been given.

He hasn’t forgotten that he’s going to be shot, but he’d like to put it off as long as possible.

John is able to attend to the wounds of three soldiers before he begins to die. Lying on the ground, unable to move his arm or cry for help in a way that distinguishes him from the others, he clutches a convolvulus to his chest as blood gushes from his wounded left shoulder. _Please, God, let me live._

In the hospital, he apologizes for not warning his superior officers that this was going to happen.

They assume it’s a side effect of the morphine and honorably discharge him.

\---

One night, the 29th of January, John lies in bed and stares at the ceiling as he remembers a day several years in the future when he will be shot in the shoulder during a combat mission in Afghanistan.

He won’t be old enough to join the military for quite awhile yet, but it’s of the utmost importance that he does so as soon as he's allowed.

Some decisions are easier than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles are from the OST to _Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma_ (2016); story title is from "Trigger" from the OST to _Zankyou no Terror_ (2014).
> 
> Convolvulus: Morning glory
> 
> My fanfiction/writing tumblr: [fear of a direct hit](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com)


	2. tough decision

Wednesday is a doubled-over film strip, every moment delayed by a fraction of a second. Life is rather dull today, John thinks; everything is predictable, everything is broadcast and projected and all of that. Harry continues to insist that it isn’t, that everything is new and exciting—well, not everything, maybe not maths—and he shakes his head and goes about his business.

He wonders how someone so thrilled by everything so mundane could end up such a persistent alcoholic. Then again, maybe it makes perfect sense; something to take the edge off, dull the colors, blur the frame.

“What are _you_ going to do?” Harry sneers, as though he’s never done a worthwhile thing in his life. Maybe he hasn’t; probably he hasn’t.

“Send you to rehab,” he says dryly, because of course, and doesn’t she know? This is how things are, this is how they’ve always been. This is how he meets Sherlock (who?), which is basically the point because Harry won’t be able to maintain her sobriety on her own when John is sent off to war.

Have a little faith, John. Maybe this time will be different.

_Ha._

\---

The visitors’ room is empty when he arrives. Funny; the radar man at the front desk assured him Harry would be here.

John waits, and waits, and waits.

Harry pours herself in out of the corridor, stumbling to the chair across from his and sitting heavily, nearly sliding onto the floor.

“ _John._ ”

She smiles toothily, taking his hands in hers.

Funny; this is supposed to be a rehabilitation clinic.

John waits, and waits, and waits.

“You are,” Harry says seriously, “a very important person. And I am _lucky_ to have you…in my life.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” John says spitefully, because Harry is drunk, and Harry doesn’t understand anything right now. She recoils at his words, dropping his hands to pound her fists down on the tabletop.

“You don’t know what it’s _like!_ ” she snarls, instantly furious. “Day in, day out, do this and that and you’ll get better and just _trust_ us we know what’s _best_ for you and on and on and _on!_ John, you don’t—you don’t know what it’s _like!_ ” She pounds her fists again, and he doesn’t remember this part. “And you can’t _judge_ me for it, why don’t you go beat up on _mum_ for a bit, huh?”

(I am not my father’s son.)

“Where’s Sherlock?”

She narrows her eyes until they’re nearly closed.

“ _Who?_ ”

John shakes his head; he doesn’t feel like explaining. Doesn’t feel like sharing. Doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about.

“Forget it. Look, Harry…” He can’t look at her as he speaks, can’t look at her for this, but the words have to be out there, even if she won’t understand (not right now). “If you’re not going to take this seriously, I don’t know why I should keep paying for you to stay here.”

She tries to throw the table, but it’s bolted to the floor. (They know what’s coming, they come prepared.) “Take this _seriously!_ ” she hollers. “When have _you_ ever? You ran off to the war as soon as you turned eighteen, off to your fancy medical degree just to prove you’re _better_ than me!” Slapping her palms down (that must’ve hurt), she leans forward, putting her face up close to his. “You didn’t stay home with _mum,_ did you? You didn’t stick around after _dad_ left, you weren’t there to pick up any of the _pieces._ ”

That’s not what happened.

Her breath smells like whiskey, so he’ll forgive her.

Then again, her breath smells like whiskey.

“You know what, Harry, fine.” He stands, hands balled into white-knuckled fists. “Fine. How the hell you got your hands on alcohol in a _rehabilitation clinic_ is beyond me, but you know what? Fine.”

She crosses her arms and turns her nose up, full of righteous contempt.

“I’ll be back in awhile,” he says. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

He will.

Maybe.

\---

John isn’t here to see Harry today; instead he asks the administrators for a man named Sherlock. He’s sorry that he doesn’t know the surname, but it’s quite an unusual given name and surely they would know if he was here.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t release patient information to the general public.”

He smiles thinly, trying to maintain composure. “I’m not the general public; my sister is a patient here. Harriet Watson. I’ve been to visit her several times this year, surely someone on staff must know me.”

“Well maybe you ought to ask her about your friend, then.”

“But—”

“Good day, sir.”

“I—”

“Good day, sir.”

“She—”

“Good day, sir.”

The radar man at the front desk gives him a butterfly sticker and sends him on his way, and the streets are flooded with black water when he steps outside.

Welcome, Doctor.

Here’s some warm hospitality.

\---

With mild difficulty not atypical for the field, John finishes his degree and reports to his commanding officers that he’s extraordinarily eager to deploy to Afghanistan, where he will be shot in the left shoulder and possibly (but not definitely) die on the battlefield.

He doesn’t mention that last part.

The terrain is sandy and the sun is hot, and it hurts to breathe. None of this is unusual.

John is able to attend to the wounds of five soldiers and admit to two lost causes before he begins to die. Lying on the ground, unable to move his arm or cry for help in a way that distinguishes him from the others, he clutches an amaryllis to his chest as blood gushes from his wounded left shoulder. _Please, God, let me live._

In the hospital, he apologizes for not warning his superior officers that this was going to happen.

They wonder if he’s been abusing his access to morphine and honorably discharge him.

\---

Mike Stamford, who runs into John in the park on a mundane day at a nondescript time and insists that they were medical students together, brings John along to the laboratory at Barts to meet a man whose identity he refuses to divulge. John asks thirteen times for details and is sick of Mike’s impish smile once they finally arrive.

The man stands at a table, hunched intently over a petri dish.

Sherlock, John realizes abruptly. This is Sherlock.

Well, it’s about time.

\---

John and Sherlock move into 221B Baker Street almost immediately; almost immediately, John stops living days in overlapping time.

He’d like to thank Sherlock, who surely must be responsible (how?), but he can’t find the words and doesn’t exactly know what he wants to explain, anyway.

My life finally has new parts to it, and I think it’s because of you.

That doesn’t make any sense, does it.

“Sherlock,” he asks one day when he’s feeling bold, “what would you think of a person who said he was living two lives at the same time?”

Sherlock frowns as though John has said something worrying. “I should think he was doing a poor job of keeping his adultery a secret, and quite probably he’s taken on more than he can handle.”

No, no, it was a stupid question.

John hums agreeably.

“Right, I can see that.”

Sherlock doesn’t seem convinced.

\---

Sherlock the consulting detective (only one in the world) easily folds John into his life, and John goes willingly; when Detective Inspector Lestrade of New Scotland Yard calls on them to help solve a case of serial suicides, Sherlock leaps at the chance. Serial killers (obviously that’s what this is, don’t be daft) are, after all, his favorites.

John is more excited than he ought to be, considering several people are dead.

Watching Sherlock work turns out to be a fascinating pastime, and John finds himself glad they met under these circumstances instead of any others; he wonders if Sherlock even is a drug addict, if he has a list, if he knows how to fake being well. Probably not. Surely not, he has no need for such atrocities.

Then, of course, Sherlock abandons him at a crime scene to hunt down a suitcase, and John’s blind faith takes a bit of a hit.

And yet, and yet.

It isn’t until they’re separated that John truly begins to worry.

All this novelty is no longer refreshing.

Because he’s brilliant, and some brilliance begins accidentally, Sherlock leaves the tracker for the most recently deceased woman’s phone in the flat; because he’s quick, and trusts Sherlock implicitly, John understands enough to follow the tracker to the college where Sherlock has been taken.

There’s a building on the left and a building on the right.

John closes his eyes and thinks hard. _Nothing is new and I have seen this place before._

No, he hasn’t.

“Sherlock!”

Worthless, that was worthless.

Are there clues? There must be clues, this is a crime scene, a criminal investigation.

This is a parking lot in the dead of night, of course there aren’t clues.

Flip a coin, will you?

_This is a game of chance._

Take the one on the right.

(Sure, why not.)

Sprinting, John bursts through the front doors; the interior is dark, most of the doors are locked. He tries every one, just in case. Where are they, where are they? Sherlock and the murderer, they must be here, they _must._ John throws open the door to the stairwell, dashes to the first floor; dark, it’s dark, the doors are locked, locked—John runs to the second floor, tries again (more of the same)—the third floor, that’s the top, please Sherlock, please be here!

“ _Sherlock!_ ”

A light in the distance—

( _the door is locked_ )

ready aim fire, ready aim fire away

—the door splinters at the keyhole, opens with a shove, and there are two men at the table, two men seated in front of two little, empty, bottles.

“ _SHERLOCK!_ ”

The stranger laughs, a sickly sound, and it turns John’s stomach.

“That’s not gonna do much good, is it, Doctor Watson?” he mocks, the man who knows everything. “Bit late for it now, I should think.”

John breathes through his teeth.

“You’re a murderer.”

The man laughs again. “You’ve got it all wrong, haven’t you? I’m not a murderer; I’m a survivor. Five for five, that’s an awfully good run, I’d say.”

Too good for any one man.

_Bang bang._

A golden fox rips out the stranger’s throat and jumps out the window.

And there are two men at the table, one man seated in front of two little empty bottles, one man’s face sponging up a pool of blood.

John puts the gun in his pocket.

Then.

\---

Mike Stamford, who runs into John in the park on a mundane day at a nondescript time and reminds him that they were medical students together, brings John along to the laboratory at Barts to meet a man whose identity he refuses to divulge. John asks twice for details and ignores Mike’s impish smile in response to both requests.

The man stands at a table, hunched intently over a petri dish.

Sherlock, John realizes abruptly. Sherlock is alive.

This is the road that divides the past from the present.


	3. quondam monitors

John and Sherlock move into 221B Baker Street almost immediately; John remembers where all the utensils belong in the kitchen, all the dishes, the pots and pans and Erlenmeyer flasks and Bunsen burners. John has done this before.

He’d like to explain this to Sherlock, who must be thinking too highly of him and the way they fit together so effortlessly, but he can’t find the words and doesn’t exactly know what all of this is supposed to mean, anyway.

I’ve lived this life already, and I think everything comes back to you.

That’s a bit frightening.

“Sherlock,” he says one day when he’s feeling bold, “I have this feeling that I’ve known you all my life, that one way or another, we were always supposed to meet.”

Sherlock frowns as though John has said something worrying. “Oh, John, you’ve not become a fatalist, surely.”

No, that’s not exactly what he’s trying to say.

John hums disagreeably.

“More like…no matter what the situation, even if I didn’t know I was doing it, I’d always make decisions that would eventually lead to you.”

Sherlock seems cautiously optimistic.

\---

Detective Inspector Lestrade barges into their flat and Sherlock welcomes him like an old friend. John resists the impulse to do the same; he doesn’t know this man. Gregory Lestrade. Estranged from his wife. Five-year acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes (though he doesn’t know him well). Uses nicotine patches. John doesn’t know any of these details (he does, he does).

“Will you come,” he says.

Of course they will.

Lestrade drives off with his sirens blaring; John and Sherlock take the ferry boat.

The suitcase, John thinks, the suitcase is pink.

(The what?)

\---

Serial suicides? Absurd! These deaths are the work of a serial killer, of course (Sherlock doesn’t know how, not yet), and those are the best, the most fun.

“People are dying, Sherlock,” John reminds him (it’s a formality, a formality).

“It’s Christmas,” Sherlock replies.

John grabs Sherlock’s shoulder, turns them face-to-face.

“Don’t take the poison pill,” he says gravely.

Sherlock nods; of course, that makes perfect sense.

(Thank you for believing in me.)

\---

Late at night, after Sherlock has gone (John didn’t know where the first time it happened and he doesn’t know now), John stands at the table in the sitting room and watches the computer. The dial spins, taking much too long; John doesn’t remember where to go (flip a coin), but he knows what he has to do when he gets there.

Life and everything has never been so clear.

Something is severely, drastically wrong.

But don’t people usually want that sort of thing? People search, and hunt, and learn, and scheme, and fight, and think, and wonder, and all sorts of things for moments of clarity, mere _moments._ This is more than a moment; this is a lifetime condensed, and nothing in the history of everything has been so clear as this, the computer to the phone to the college to the building on the right.

Left.

John needs to go to the left, to race up the stairs and find the window and shoot the bad man before Sherlock takes the poison pill (he will, he will).

John hasn’t forgotten what it feels like to kill a man who deserves it.

\---

After Sherlock doesn’t die, he and John go out for dinner. John doesn’t have much of an appetite, but he recognizes the gesture. (Neither does Sherlock, but so does he.)

After the seagull shows them to their table and rollerblades back to his podium, John folds his hands on top of the table and clears his throat.

“What do you know,” he says as he looks out the window, “about time travel?”

Rather than terminate their relationship on the spot, Sherlock folds his hands on top of the table and looks at the wall.

“Logically impossible,” he says after awhile. “Are you familiar with the discovery of the pear-shaped nucleus?”

John smiles. “No.”

“Well, it is.”

And yet, and yet.

“I knew you before I met you,” John says to the park across the street.

“You’ve been to my website,” Sherlock reminds the table to his right.

_I watched you die._

That would speed things along, or stop them up entirely. John intends to forget that particular memory at his earliest possible convenience, anyway.

He wonders if Sherlock is being purposefully obtuse. No; just slowing down a logically impossible situation. Maybe this way we can understand, make sense out of this nonsensical idea.

“I know your brother sent you to a rehabilitation clinic when you were younger,” John says, hoping it’s still true this time around (hoping more that it doesn’t have to be). Sherlock stills; that answers that.

To his credit, he doesn’t ask the obvious question.

_How._

The silence drags on and on through space (time being a fiction invented by human beings) and John watches a gentle wind rustle the leaves on the trees.

“I met you there, when I was visiting Harry,” he goes on. “You told me your overbearing brother forced you in and you stayed so he wouldn’t bother you, and you were on about ten different drugs. You had a list, you said, but you could get out whenever you wanted.”

“No one ever visited me.”

Sherlock’s voice his quiet, and the words are hard to understand. John knits his fingers together so they overlap the other way.

“I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The pear-shaped (i.e., asymmetric) nucleus is a (fairly) recent discovery in the field of physics which is, for once, drawing attention to the study of nuclear structure, but to boil it down to the thing that most people are paying attention to and is most relevant here: time travel is likely impossible.


	4. interminable dilemma

Ice crystals begin to form on the trees in the park and John takes it as his cue to shift his gaze to Sherlock, who doesn’t look back.

Sherlock, eat something. Your bees are getting cold.

“You didn’t,” Sherlock says finally. “Not this time.”

(That’s not to say it didn’t happen elsewhere.)

“I tried to,” John presses. “This time I asked them about you, when I went to visit Harry, I tried to see if you were there, I tried to see _you._ They wouldn’t tell me anything, they said I was ‘the general public.’”

Slamming his hands down on the table, Sherlock sweeps his coat over his shoulders as he skates out of the restaurant, leaving John to watch the wall and his eyes to droop sadly at the corners. Better luck next time, mister doctor sir.

“Aren’t you?” Sherlock asks, resting his elbows on the tabletop and meeting John’s gaze (finally). “You’re not family.”

Aren’t I?

Control yourself, John.

He sighs out his nose.

“No. I…I guess I’m not.”

Smacking his palms down on the table, Sherlock stands and unlocks the window, hurtling himself out into the street and storming away as John watches the wall and closes his eyes sadly. Don’t let this happen again, mister doctor sir.

“How many times have you met me?” Sherlock asks without affect.

Twice.

Thrice.

A hundred and forty-six times.

“I don’t know.”

“How could you possibly not know?” Sherlock demands. “How many times have you lived the same life? How many times have you sent your sister to rehabilitation, how many times have you enlisted in the RAMC, how many times have you killed the cabbie?”

_I don’t know!_

John looks at the table to his left and clenches his fists.

“Two that I know of,” he says.

Sherlock’s legs are bouncing, and John bites down on his tongue (tries to draw blood but he won’t do it, can’t do it). There are so many questions; Sherlock’s brain is racing, surely, trying to decide where to start, trying to figure everything out without asking, trying to solve the mystery without any clues. John has so many questions, has always had questions. Why do the crows caw? Sherlock, can you tell me? Are they for the eternal goodbye?

Help me, Sherlock, help me please.

Sherlock drums his fingertips on the tabletop.

“What’s your earliest memory?”

It’s encouraging. John smiles, just for an instant.

“When I was two,” he starts, “my mother and father brought my sister home from the…”

No, that’s not right.

“From the hospital, and I…”

No, that’s not right.

“Is it?” Sherlock challenges. He doesn’t believe it. He knows.

John has a thought; he isn’t quite sure what it is.

“ _What?_ ” Sherlock challenges. He heard it. He knows.

“We’re twins,” John says, “Harry and I. I’m older, I was born first, but, we’re twins.”

“So _what_ is your earliest _memory?_ ”

John pulls at the tablecloth, picks up his fork and drops it.

“About a week ago, I was walking in the park,” he says to his water glass, “and I ran into Mike Stamford, and he asked me what I’d been up to.” He laughs hysterically, but only on the inside.

“Everything before that is just…stuff that I’ve heard about that happened.”

Softening his gaze a full octave, Sherlock leans back in his chair and his legs still. Good, this is good.

“Everything is upside down, but I feel safe around you,” John offers, not that it matters. Sherlock is stuck inside his head. Their watches tic slightly out of sync, a maddening metronome.

When John looks out the window, a gentle wind rustles the leaves on the trees.

The streetlamps shine brightly and it’s much too dark to see.

\---

Without a bit of warning, Sherlock drops a ream of papers a meter high in John’s lap, knocking the book in his hands to the floor.

“Thanks for that,” John says as he skims the page. It’s a list of names, none of which John has ever heard before, each listed with a number (none above four).

“Others with your condition,” Sherlock explains as he puts the kettle on. “Several have been committed to mental institutions; the ones who haven’t are friends and relatives who learned from their examples.”

John folds the paper into an aeroplane.

“The numbers refer to the number of different timelines they attest to having lived in.”

Across the wingspan, John writes a large **2** (under that, a small _?_ ).

“For your peace of mind, a strong hypothesis is that your ability to retain the memories from those various timelines is strengthened with each trip.”

Squinting one eye closed, John takes aim at the skull of a bison hung on the wall between the two living room windows.

“It stands to reason that if the trip you’re in right now began only upon your meeting Mike Stamford, you—this you, the one you are now, experienced your life prior to that meeting several times, some parts of it more than once, but for the most part, that life, and the versions of it, have been erased from your mind, completely forgotten. The details you think you know are either stories you’ve been told by others or fiction you’ve invented to fill the gaps.”

John throws the aeroplane and hits the skull’s earphones, getting it stuck in the right eye socket.

“Thank you for not putting me in a mental institution,” John says thoughtfully.

Sherlock pours two mugs of sugar and adds to one of them a few spoonsful of tea.

“When you’ve eliminated the impossible,” he says authoritatively, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

John accepts one of the mugs and turns it in his hands.

“The other day, you were quite insistent that time travel was impossible.”

Sherlock taps his index finger to his temple.

“ _Logically_ impossible,” he corrects.

“You’re saying I’m illogical?”

“Quite possibly the most logical of us all.”

John finds that hard to believe. “Really.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Of course not, John, this entire situation is the very nature of absurdity.”

“But you’re not going to install me in a mental institution.”

“Because I can imagine no other means by which you could have known that my brother had me institutionalized, as he made _quite_ sure to keep it ‘off the record,’ as it were, and if you had visited me…”

The pause is long and intentional.

“I would have remembered.”

I’m flattered, truly I am.

“The only missing piece now is what causes you to skip from one timeline to another.”

Well, that part is easy enough. John puts his hands on the armrests of his chair and tries to think of a way to phrase this delicately.

“Death.”

Sherlock throws his hands into the air.

“Of _course!_ ”

Ta da!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concept of "time travel" is 100% lifted from _Zero Escape_ , but since there aren't any characters or specific plot points from the series appearing or mentioned in this story, I don't consider it a crossover.


	5. unliberated library

John spends a lot of time trying not to die.

In general, his success rate is quite high; for all the danger inherent in Sherlock’s line of work, of which John has apparently become an integral part, only one case even threatens to send him to the hospital, where he’s treated and released with such speed and efficiency that it makes him far more suspicious than anything else that’s happened this week. Sherlock tells him not to worry, though, so he doesn’t. Not dead and all that.

Then comes Baskerville.

Dogs, dogs are everywhere; black, white, brown, copper, gold, aluminum, following them, chasing them, so many dogs. How odd that they should be found on such a restricted military base; John likes the pink one best, but he does feel a bit bad that Sherlock is gradually losing his mind.

Sitting by a cozy fire in a rustic little restaurant at the end of a particularly trying day, Sherlock bellows that he works alone and John doesn’t feel so bad anymore.

(Well, maybe just a little.)

Then comes the laboratory.

John forgets everything before now and the possibility of any future after; he fears he’s gone back in time ( _again_ ) but no, that’s not quite right; this is Baskerville, this is the lab, this is where all those secret experiments go on and the luminescent animals come out and god knows what other viruses and weapons and Sherlock Sherlock help me please! Sherlock! Oh god, I see it, there it is, the monster, Sherlock, _the hound of Baskerville—!_

\---

After Sherlock doesn’t die, he and John go out for dinner. John is simultaneously sick at the very idea of food and ravenously hungry.

His stomach turns and red edges the darkness in his vision. He is livid.

Sherlock orders wine.

“How could you—”

John starts but doesn’t finish.

It’s not a fair question (not right now). But he wants to ask it (so, so badly).

“It’s quite simple if you’ve the right frame of mind,” Sherlock says breezily, assuming the question was about to speed along the motorway when in fact John intended to drive it off a cliff.

John sighs and stares at the tablecloth.

“Sherlock,” he queries, “would you ever… Would you ever put my life at risk to help solve a case?”

Sherlock drinks tea and ponders the question.

“No,” he decides. “No, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Wouldn’t you?” John challenges (not fair, not fair). Well, it just slipped out.

To his credit, Sherlock looks baffled.

“I certainly would never do it intentionally,” he says after awhile, which ought to be appeasing but isn’t.

“I’ll hold you to that,” John says, sounding an awful lot like an accusation, and Sherlock (bless him) tries to take it in stride.

“I would expect nothing less.”

Good.

“Good.”

Good.

\---

John’s worry over the cabbie is mostly manufactured. He knows well enough not to stop it from happening That Way, even though he could, but he also knows the part he gets to play, and it’s not a bad one. The only trick is remembering to take his gun along to the college (he nearly forgot once, maybe, which would have been disastrous if it had been true).

Also, the building is the one on the left.

Every day, John wants to tell Sherlock that he’s lived this all before.

Every day, he doesn’t say a word.

\---

Then comes Baskerville.

This time, John is prepared.

He holds no affection for the dogs this time (that way lies madness) and he’s determined not to be afraid; on the other hand, he isn’t surprised when the plan fails just a bit.

“Get me out, Sherlock,” he says, trying to keep his voice level. Too level, can’t have that.

“John? John?”

Oh god, Sherlock, please don’t be afraid, please, I couldn’t take it.

“Can you see it?”

John holds the mobile tightly, presses it to his face, wills the answer to be no, no, no, but—

“I _can_ see it.”

Oh god,

“It’s here.”

oh god,

“It’s here.”

please, Sherlock, please do something, _do something,_ I don’t want to go back again, not again, not _now—_

“Are you alright?”

Sherlock is here, the door is open, the lights are on, everything is alright, everything will be fine

but first—

“You _promised._ ”

Of all things, Sherlock looks _startled._ Sherlock looks _anxious,_ and why? What does Sherlock have to be afraid of? Sherlock is invincible, Sherlock will be reborn a thousand times ( _Sherlock doesn’t know_ ).

“John, you were never in any danger,” Sherlock insists. John would like to hit him, but it feels unfair.

(So?)

“You _promised_ ,” he says and hopes it feels like a blow to the head.

He did, didn’t he? (Or did he?) Yes, definitely. (That was this same Sherlock, wasn’t it?)

Yes. Definitely.

\---

In the dead of night, John wakes from a restless sleep and scrambles frantically for the list of other unfortunate souls with his affliction.

No, no, it’s not so bad, really it’s not.

(All things are worse than they are when pulled through the eye of a needle into the dark night.)

Where is it, where is it… The bedside table, he put it _right there—_

No.

Obvious.

John lives **2** ( _?_ ) lives at once. This is his affliction, his burden, his gift. Sherlock doesn’t know, not this time, Sherlock hasn’t been told. Who were those people? John barely remembers any of their names; maybe they don’t even exist here. Probably. Maybe. Who could say? No one does, no one can.

John lies down and puts his pillow on his face.

Sleep now, little soldier. Morning comes to those who wait.

\---

Laying his hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, John pushes him into the living room and sits him down in his grey leather chair.

“I travel through time,” John says flatly, standing over him and trying not to seem too mad. For what it’s worth, Sherlock doesn’t appear shaken.

“How?” Sherlock asks.

Good, this is good.

Definitely.


	6. riddle and puzzle 2nd mix

“Are you sure that no one knows the mechanics?” Sherlock asks skeptically. John would prefer not to answer.

“I’ve never met anyone else who…has this.”

“So someone might.”

John shrugs. He hasn’t given much thought to this side of the thing; controlling it, the hops skips jumps, has always seemed more important, or adjusting to the fallout when it happens. Of course, as a medical man, a man of science, that’s a terrible way to handle the situation. Must be the soldier in him, acting on all that instinct. Terrible.

“John.”

“Sherlock.”

Don’t be petulant, idiot.

“What is your earliest memory?”

“Baskerville,” John replies immediately, because that’s where we began (this time) and that’s the easiest way to begin (this conversation).

John is learning.

Sherlock will learn. In time, perhaps. For now he seems unconvinced, so John shrugs and says something pitiful and true.

“Everything before that is just stuff that I’ve heard about that happened.”

“But you didn’t live it.”

There’s a fire in Sherlock’s eyes that’s never been there before, and John wonders jealously what’s already happened in this life (here but not there) to draw it out. Nothing as good as this, he thinks with spite, nothing as right and true and pure as him and me, as we’ve always been meant to be.

“No,” he says coolly, resenting and appreciating the truth in equal measures. “Actually I did, in a sense, but I don’t…remember it that way. More like a movie I saw once, sometime, but I can’t remember when.” He laughs without humor. “Or what it was about, completely.”

There’s no follow-up to that. Sherlock seems to sense that he’s stepped into somewhere he doesn’t belong (which is madness, being that Sherlock is and belongs everywhere).

In response, John looks carefully at his words spilled out across the table. Times New Roman, 12-point font, double spaced. One-inch margins.

“I remember you,” he offers.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says.

Wrong.

“Please don’t be.” (It sounds more broken in my head.)

Sherlock sighs the frustrated sort of sigh that means he wants to say something he won’t.

“Have you considered that if you and I were not to meet,” he says instead of that, “you would be able to find some meaning beyond this cycle? This loop you’ve become wedged into?”

“It’s not a loop.”

“You know what I mean.”

John wants to say yes. He wants to say yes, I’ve considered every option, I’ve unlocked every door, opened every window, walked down every street. He wants to say no, I haven’t even thought it because the idea makes me sick, the very notion is wrong, wrong, wrong in every way. He wants to say you give my life meaning, and I think I give you something too, because it’s not just me who keeps finding you but you who keeps drawing me into your world, your orbit. We are inextricable, you and I, and I apologize for destroying you in this way.

“I don’t think it would work out too well,” he says at last. “I tried it once before.”

Lies.

“One is hardly a respectable sample size.”

The frown lines on John’s face are set hard and deep.

“It didn’t work out.”

Lies.

Sherlock tents his fingers before his face.

“I see.”

Or so you think.

\---

It doesn’t take Sherlock more than a few days to come up with a list this time. As far as John can recall, though, it’s identical to the other one. Well, one name is missing, not that it means much: Maria. She must be dead. That’s nice; he didn’t think it was possible. Good. There’s hope for the least of us.

He doesn’t know who she is.

Things are going quite well, all in all. Sherlock solves dozens of cases, receiving his accolades with indifference and disdain, and John lives on pins and needles in a way somewhat different from the way he’s always known. In time, he forgets about Maria, who is irrelevant, and keeps the list in his breast pocket, even though he never looks at it.

The golden fox haunts him in the night; blood drips from its fangs and its tail.

Things are going well.

Things are going well until they aren’t.

\---

Mycroft, who John has never met before (despite having met him at least ~~fifteen times~~ once), catapults into the flat to demand that Sherlock investigate the disappearance of a flash drive containing important information critical to the defense of the phantasmal castle ( _don’t touch it_ ). Sherlock refuses, of course, the only sensible choice, and then Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade summons them to New Scotland Yard with a call from a phone trapped in a strongbox.

John nearly falls down the stairs for no discernable reason; time has been shuffled like a deck of cards (it’s clear as day, though how he knows, he can’t be sure).

On the street in front of Two Two One B, Sherlock’s phone rings, loud and curt.

“Hello, sexy.”

John doesn’t feel right.

“Who’s this?” Sherlock asks as he puts his hand in his coat pocket and rolls his eyes.

Shadows cast shadows across the moonlight strip as acid begins to rain down from the sky.

"Twelve hours to solve my puzzle, Sherlock."

Maybe tomorrow is a better day.


	7. portentousness

The games are fun, Sherlock claims, though John is unable to see it, being imbalanced as he is. Rather than merely agree, which would be the easiest thing, he elects to hold No Opinion; human lives may be at stake, but life and death are meaningless constructs, so what’s the harm?

“Have you ever died?” Sherlock asks one night as they sit on the balcony atop an ivory tower. John laughs out of shock and some amusement.

“Probably,” he says, though he’s never thought about it in those terms. “I can’t’ve survived that bullet every time, now, can I.”

Sherlock goes quiet in that thoughtful way he does sometimes and they both look out over the city, the park, the streets. Pedestrian traffic is slow at night.

“Statistically unlikely,” Sherlock admits. “So I suppose then that a theoretically infinite number of John Watsons exist in a theoretically infinite number of…timelines, swapping in and out of each other’s bodies as they may or may not die in the face of danger. But,” here we go, “I find myself unable to mourn any of that; if he hadn’t died there, whoever pushed you out of that other world, then I wouldn’t have met you here.”

Huh.

Well, there’s that side of it.

“It’s a nice feeling,” John ponders, “to belong somewhere.”

Whatever reaction he was expecting after that, he doesn’t think it was for Sherlock to scowl darkly and throw him over the balustrade.

“Don’t act like this is something permanent,” Sherlock mutters, which is a destructive and bilious thing to hear. John leans back in his chair and clenches his fists in the fabric of his trousers.

“Are you planning to get rid of me?”

Sherlock laughs (actually _laughs_ ). “Of course not,” as though the idea is absurd (and it is). “But you can’t possibly feel that you _belong_ here. You don’t _belong_ anywhere, you don’t fit better into one reality than any other; there is no truth for you, no right answer, no…perfect fit. There is only what we all agree upon at any given time, the world we collectively choose to see. There is merely what is, what has been leading to what might be.”

John is tempted to throw Sherlock over the balustrade.

“So you’re just counting down the days until I’m out of your life forever.”

“Oh, John, that’s not what I meant.”

Has it always been this way?

John rests his elbows on his knees and doesn’t quite remember.

“I’d just as soon keep you around for the rest of my life,” Sherlock goes on flippantly, “but you must know that isn’t your lot. You and I may be destined to meet up with every turn of the screw, but for every life I’ve lived, or will live, you’ve done the same many times over. A practical imbalance.”

“So there’s no stopping for me, I just need to keep going on and on forever.”

“As you’ve always done.”

John laughs; he might as well. “It’s a bit different now.”

Sherlock touches his hand, which feels like a strange gesture, and they watch the moon collide with the sun.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says tenderly.

Yes, well.

“So am I.”

\---

Reality (This reality as opposed to That or The Other) tries hard to sort itself out after that.

John is out at the shops for some fish meatballs when he receives a curious call ( _blocked number_ ) directing him to Barts without further explanation. The trip is mandatory, obviously. He doesn’t know why.

When the cab bursts onto the scene moments later, John’s mobile rings again, a tone he doesn’t quite recognize even though he should ( _Sherlock’s Theme_ ).

“Turn around and walk back the way you came now.”

But—but this is mandatory.

“Just do as I ask.”

But I thought…

“There.”

Underneath the hardness, Sherlock’s voice has a mournful note to it that makes John pause, makes him follow along with the commands even though this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Not exactly.

How, then?

Not like this.

Not like this.

“Keep your eyes on me.”

John does because Sherlock asked, and John will follow Sherlock’s lead (for now) until he can’t (or won’t), and it ends up being, not altogether surprisingly, one of the worst decisions he’s ever made.

If you ever have an opportunity to watch your very best friend in all the world(s) leap to his death, you should probably (definitely) look anywhere else.

No one has ever felt the need to point this out to John before, and it leads to one of the worst decisions he’s ever made.

Reality (This one as opposed to That or The Other) lines up with a shuffle and a click and John thinks very hard about shooting himself right in the head.

It’s a little unclear what he wants the outcome to be.

\---

John will wake on the battlefield with a cherry blossom clutched to his chest as blood pours from his wounded left shoulder. He will wake in the hospital and apologize for doing nothing to change history, to change the future, and they will test his morphine levels and honorably discharge him with a warning he won’t take to heart (not even a little).

John will make a point of being in the park on a mundane day at a nondescript time so as to accidentally encounter Mike Stamford, who was a student at Barts with him some time ago, and he’ll go along quietly when Mike brings him back to Barts to meet a strange friend of his who’s looking for a flatmate. He will choose the building on the left and write **3** ( _?_ ) across the wings of a paper aeroplane and remember to be afraid in the labs at Baskerville.

John will not remember his childhood quite right and sometimes it’ll bother him, but Sherlock will be there and no one will commit suicide or shoot themselves in the head and everything will be alright in the end.

Well.

Shall we begin?


	8. blue bird lamentation

John doesn’t wake on the battlefield.

John wakes in his bed in 221B Baker Street and stares at bolts of light sweeping across the ceiling, headlights flaring as cars pass intermittently on the street below. It must be very early, or very late. (Time is a fictitious construct.)

Reality lines up with a shuffle and a click and ~~nothing~~ everything is as it should be.

No decision he’s ever made has been important. We were always going to come to this point.

John thinks very hard about shooting himself right in the head.

That would fix everything, wouldn’t it just?

\---

John has a job at a clinic near to Baker Street. Well, near enough. He doesn’t remember getting it, exactly, the application process or the hiring or any of that, but they seem to know him there; his name is on the office door and everything, and that’s his handwriting on the files in the drawer, a system of organization that makes perfect sense.

Shuffle and a click.

The doctor who hired him is named Sarah Sawyer; she claims they were out on a date, once, but it didn’t work out, it’s fine, let’s not dwell on it. John has no memory of the Chinese acrobats she wishes she could forget. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge.

Sure.

A nurse named Mary flirts with him as though they’ve been in a relationship for a long time. John plays along for awhile before he stops pretending to know anything about her; she resists, calls him cold and distant, acts like all of this is _his_ fault, but she wants to help him, please, that’s all, I just want to see you smiling again, John, _please._

It’s a living.

Some days, he goes up to the roof of the tallest building he can find and sits with his legs hanging over the edge.

“Keep your eyes on me,” he mutters.

Will you do that?

No take-backs.

“Would you catch me?” he asks one day. “If I fell, would you make sure I was alright?”

“I would do whatever I had to,” Sherlock says without hesitation, sitting with his legs hanging over the edge.

John smiles a bit, laughs a bit. The wind smells faintly of cigarette smoke, drifting up from the pavement below; he leans over to look at the piss-ants pacing back and forth. Life and everything carries on underneath.

He stands up; every time he stands up, he is beaten.

“And if I jumped?”

John, John, John.

You were such a good little child.

\---

It’s been months, he thinks. Months or days; a year at the most, maybe two. Who knows. It’s not the sort of question he can ask other people.

Sometimes Sherlock sits in the extra chair John leaves in the corner of his office for parents or overly-concerned loved ones. Sometimes he makes snide comments about patients’ stupid complaints; sometimes John laughs. Patients are always offended, often confused; John doesn’t particularly mind.

“Tell me you don’t regret it,” Sherlock often requests. “Tell me we had something good.”

“You know I don’t,” John always replies. “Of course we did.”

“Tell me you’re happy, John,” Sherlock requests today. “Tell me you’re content.”

John thinks about jumping.

“Tell me you’re happy, John.”

John thinks about how many chances a person needs.

“Tell me you’re content.”

John puts his head in his hands and falls asleep at his desk.

\---

Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade stops by 221B Baker Street without an appointment and doesn’t think to ring the bell. Good thing he’s brought a box full of nothing, or John would have been furious.

“That’s some stuff from my office,” Greg says with a stiff gesture to the sofa, where the box sits for lack of anything better to do. “Some stuff of Sherlock’s. I probably should have thrown it out, but I didn’t know if…”

John nods sagely as flames break out to the left and to the right.

“Yeah.”

After Greg leaves, John sits on the sofa and puts his arm over the back as he sips his whiskey. The box is a fine companion, a lovely date.

They’ll grow old together, if such a thing is possible.

John isn’t quite sure he’s capable.

\---

The cold night has long since fallen when John goes back to the cemetery. It’s not hard to break in.

The earth quakes under his feet.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

“Well,” John says flatly, “at least you got what you wanted. Didn’t you. Keeping me around for the rest of your life.”

Ha. It’s all so funny, one big joke. Ha, ha, ha. John tries to smile, just to see what would happen.

Nothing.

“I’m not sure this is quite what you meant, though.” He sighs out his nose, feels it in his chest. “At least I hope it isn’t.”

The ground is spongy and damp, likely staining his trousers when he sits; that’s right, it was supposed to rain earlier today. John’s office doesn’t have a window. Maybe it does. He isn’t sure.

“Should I try again, do you think? Run on back to the park that day with Mike, or Afghanistan before that; visiting my sister at the clinic while I tried to get my doctorate, or even further, should I go back to being that boy, that boy who doesn’t understand why no one else seems to live in the world the same way he does.” He shakes his head at the tombstone, and it encourages him to keep going with a little wave.

“I can’t get away from you, and you know the worst of it is I don’t think I really want to. But god, Sherlock, I thought I was doing alright this time, I thought _we_ were doing alright!” He wants to cry, he wants to die, he wants to something, anything better than this. “I thought maybe, maybe this time, things are going to turn out fine. Or—well enough, things are going to be good enough, because we must deserve that after everything, _I_ must deserve that by now, don’t I? I just, I thought…”

The tombstone turns away shamefacedly.

John presses his palms to his eyes.

“Sherlock, please, just…stop being dead.”


	9. Extreme Urgency (what will you decide?)

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

John dreams of candy-colored swallowtails and noble warriors ripped up and broken, bumblebees and zebras prancing on dead branches and casting no shadows. A duck sits quietly at the foot of a mountain, writing a tragic caricature with a leek dipped in the light of a setting sun. Every morning, the visions fall together in perfect harmony, and then John leaves the house and nothing makes sense in all the world.

Sherlock, please stop being dead.

Every day the line dividing what is real from what is not becomes more and more absurd, the act John puts on more and more humorless, routine, indifferent, obscene. The nurse named Mary tells him that this is just the way things go after a terrible loss, that she understands the pain he must be feeling, everything inside you is normal normal normal.

The truth of it is no one really knows.

But don’t they?

Then again, if Sherlock had really understood, he wouldn’t have jumped from that rooftop, would he. Wouldn’t have left John to walk through the world alone, the black hole beside him constantly threatening to open wide and demolish him somehow from the inside out. Is it grief? A waking dream? John would love to ask him, the only man with a hope of understanding.

Not a chance.

“You need help, John,” says Mary the nurse.

You have no idea what I need, John thinks, or maybe says, or screams. He spends much of his time elsewhere and it’s difficult to keep track.

“If you asked me out to dinner, I’d say yes,” she implores.

Dinner is much too intimate a place to start.

Then again…

Might as well speed along this suicide.

\---

It’s a bit funny, isn’t it, how spots of light do nothing to dispel the darkness as it stands.

Dinner with Mary the nurse is pleasant enough. The conversation is bland and inoffensive; John enjoys himself, smiling and laughing here and there, and forgets the entire event as soon as he’s left the restaurant. The next day at work, she smiles coyly as she announces his first patient, and he doesn’t understand until she’s gone, by which point it’s much too late to remove the offense of his ignorance. It’s fine. She probably finds his obliviousness endearing or something.

John’s last patient keeps him until nearly six, though he doesn’t notice until they’ve disappeared into the night and he chances to look at the clock. It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Out in the waiting room, Mary lingers, her shift having ended properly at five; John offers a bland smile and she follows him out the door in an awkward sort of silence.

“Goodnight, then,” he says pointedly as they step out onto the pavement. Her grin shows her teeth, too wide.

“I thought we might have dinner again sometime,” she fishes.

Oh, yes. That.

“I’m all booked tonight,” he lies easily, “but maybe we could meet up some other time.”

Her smile puts a nasty twist in his stomach; he wonders how many times they’ve met, how many lives he’s lived through with her. Is this how things are supposed to be? Everything else just some persistent obstacle? Sherlock merely a means to an end?

Shuffle and a click.

“How’s tomorrow?” she asks through her brazen grin. It’s about to rain; John has a long way to go.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” he says with an answering smirk. This is how it goes.

It’s a living.

\---

They’ve been dating, or what have you, for four months—Mary reminds him occasionally, keeps tabs in her head or some datebook—when John makes a hideous mistake.

Dinner is a terribly intimate place to do such a thing.

“John,” Mary murmurs, laying her hand on top of his and leaning forward across the table. “Darling, don’t you think tomorrow is a good day?”

John puts his fork down beside his plate and looks solemnly into his water glass.

Is it?

No, not especially. Not remotely.

“John,” Mary murmurs, rubbing her thumb along the back of his palm. “Darling, I think it’ll help.”

“Hm.”

She smiles; that must’ve been a yes.

Alright then.

\---

This was a terrible idea.

John’s fingers clench into a fist; Mary wedges her fingers between his and clasps their hands together.

Make room for all things good and true.

The tombstone stands indifferently as John wishes for a miracle.

“John,” Mary breathes.

Don’t speak.

We shouldn’t have done this.

\---

It’s been six months to the day.

How many lives has it been? How many times has the reset button depressed? How many shotguns, swan dives, exploding cars and sunken ships? How many times is too many?

If this is how things are supposed to be, that’s all there is for it.

Stop fighting, John. Stop wishing.

He hasn’t dreamed in six months to the day.

The waiter pours their glasses full of wine. The velvet box sits on the table without pretense. No sense in fighting the inevitable.

(How many times have we been here before?)

“What did you want to ask me?” Mary simpers. John swallows the bile in his throat.

_This is reality._

This is life.

“Meeting you has been the best thing that could have possibly happened.”

Click click click.

(How many times have I fucked this up?)

“I agree,” she says with a little grin.

He hates her.

Carry on, carry on, carry on.

“Mary,” he implores, “if you’ll have me,” he knows she will, “if you’d see your way to it.”

She waits patiently, tauntingly. Teasing.

“Sir,” the waiter interrupts.

Life and everything stops in its tracks.

Wrong. Every part of this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thank god.

The sound of a particularly noble bell cuts through the silence and John claws through the thicket surrounding them to grasp Sherlock’s lapels, yanking him off balance, lacking direction. Mary gasps daintily as they tumble to the floor; Sherlock’s skull cracks against the marble and his hands come up to close over John’s.

He hates him.

Life and everything is dead and gone.

_Tell me this is real._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A swallowtail is a type of butterfly.
> 
> I started a [writing tumblr](http://statusquoergo.tumblr.com)...so like...come on by? Do whatever you want, it's all good. I hope you have a nice day.


	10. consternation remix

The first thought is too stupid to even put to words:

_You’ve found a way to steal the thing that made me different and you used it to destroy me._

Of course not, idiot.

The second will be important later, maybe, but puts the priorities in all the wrong order:

_What on Earth did you do?_

Third time’s the charm, darling.

“Sherlock.” Just the right temperature: Cold but not unyielding, snow without ice. Just the right pitch: Flat but not emotionless, steady and strong. “Sherlock. How could you do this to me.”

Not a question in the traditional sense. Sherlock doesn’t understand, doesn’t know what he’s done; his eagerness gives him away, the hopeful brightness in his wide eyes. This is going to take much longer than anticipated.

Good thing we’ve got all the time in the world.

“There were thirteen possible escape routes—”

“Why.”

A stutter and a stop.

The moment is clear, the moment Sherlock understands; can’t get away with it this time, we all have to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. (I thought we _belonged_ together, _I thought there was always you,_ and now—) Mary watches the byplay in fascination and has no right, no _right_ to be there (doesn’t she?), but John has asked her a serious question and tied her into his life (what more is there than this) and now and now and then—

The air is too thin on top of this mountain, the skies too cold, and he's going to suffocate, alone, nothing short of all he deserves after everything, after demolishing this universe with his presence.

The question rises from the muck and mire, pinning him where he sits, where he stands:

_Why didn’t I see this coming?_

How many times has John been here, this exact spot, how many times has he suffered this fate, succumbed to this inevitability, mistaken The Way Things Are for The Way Things Must Be. How many times has Sherlock survived the fall, how many times has he returned to this place so they can get on with it, finish what they started, fit their broken parts together into something whole? How many times do they have to make these mistakes, run down these paths before they learn, before they figure out what went wrong and how to fix it? What’s the point of fucking up if they don’t get to do it right the next time around?

It isn’t fair, it isn’t _fair—_

Well, no.

And just what were you expecting?

\---

Walking down a cardboard street in the orange light of the setting sun, John sticks his hands in his pockets and watches a smiling boy post a letter to a fire hydrant and run off down the alley, to the town square, where a large crowd gathers around a department store window and watches a single black and white television; the moving image is Sherlock, standing atop Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College and holding a mobile phone to his ear. Thoughtlessly, John throws a rock at the screen, cracking it and making the picture static; the plastic onlookers applaud, smiling, always smiling.

John walks to a pub and sits at the counter, picking at the coasters and tapping his nails against the wood. The bartender lays a plate of noodles and peas in front of him; it doesn’t look like much, and he didn’t ask for it, but hey, what’s done is done.

“Thanks,” John says.

“No charge,” the bartender replies.

That’s nice.

John picks up a small box of matches and puts it in his coat pocket.

Okay.

He and Mary have lived together for awhile now. Three months to the day after that first absurd dinner (John doesn’t remember a moment of it), she made the proposal as though it was a foregone conclusion; he remembers that part. “I suppose” hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm, though he doesn’t think he would have been encouraged by such a response. Maybe that’s what makes her so perfect for him, that she takes everything he does in stride. She understands.

Not really.

That probably helps quite a bit.

But then what of Sherlock? Sherlock who _does_ understand, who made the worst mistake imaginable without even realizing it and now wants to—what? Go back to the way things were before? As if such a thing is possible. But he wants to _try,_ and that, that counts for something, doesn’t it? It has to, it— Doesn’t it?

The noodles taste like they’re made of paper. They probably are.

John pushes himself back from the bar and walks outside.

The crowd has strayed from the television screen, milling about silently with smiles frozen on their two-dimensional faces, tottering from shop to shop. Nothing is real in all the world.

Stopping at the county fair to pick up a harpoon, John swings wildly at the sky and it shatters around him, raining down in chips and shards and slats that clatter on the cobblestones beneath his feet. Another swing brings down the pub, another the department store, the plastic people and their plastic smiles. The harpoon is bloodied and slick in his hand and he drops it, watches it vanish under the curbside.

The day has long since turned to night.

“Let’s go home, shall we?” Mary says tenderly, placing her hand on his arm. John looks past her, looks to Sherlock, the only thing that’s ever been real, and catches his breath at the sight of his bloodied nose.

“Everything will be alright in the morning,” Mary goes on, walking him to the cab pulled up at the corner.

John keeps his eyes on Sherlock.

Will you do that?

\---

In the dead of night, his heart rate abruptly tripled, sweat dripping down his forehead, John wakes with a shuddering gasp, clenching his fists in the sheets over his stomach, pinching a bit of vest underneath, a bit of skin. Beside him, Mary makes a soft humming noise, a noise of sleep disturbed, and he shuts his eyes tight.

Bolts of light sweep across the ceiling, headlights flaring as cars pass intermittently on the street below.

John breathes heavily, listens to the silence and the noise.

RESTART?


	11. solitary snail

“You self-righteous little shit! You’re doing all this just to spite me, aren’t you? Aren’t you? You think you’re so much better than me, you think you’ve got it _all_ figured out. I know—I know what you’re doing, I know what you’re _thinking._ Don’t lie to me! Sit _down,_ you fucking prick, sit _down!_ Stop _lying_ to me!”

Back to one.

John folds his hands in his lap and remembers the millions of years’ worth of lies he’s told. Means to an end, every time. He doesn’t regret any of them.

Oh, look. There’s another.

He takes a shallow breath, casts his eyes to the floor.

“You never loved me,” he says quietly. This time around, everything will be the truth, and let’s see how that turns out.

His mother smacks her palm against his temple.

“You’re damn right I didn’t! Why should I? What have you ever done that was worth loving, huh? What have you _ever_ done?”

He shakes his head.

Go along, go along.

“Nothing yet.”

She spits in his hair, and he looks at his hands. Dad puts his feet up on the coffee table and turns the volume back up on the news.

“Listen to your mother.”

Survival Tactics 101.

\---

“If you’re not going to help me, what the hell am I supposed to do? You want me to just die in a trench at the bottom of a hill? Is that it, you want me to die?”

John keeps packing when he speaks.

“You’re an adult, same as me.”

Harry throws her hands into the air.

“Oh, so now this is _my_ fault! God, sorry we’re not all medical doctor genius prodigies like _some_ people, sorry we can’t all just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and ship off to—Vietnam or whatever, sorry I never bothered to _make_ something of myself. Thank you for showing me the _error_ of my ways, John, _really._ ”

John finishes packing; Harry smacks her fist down on his bag.

“And now you’re running away, like you always do. Running away from your problems, just like a real man, aren’t you? Are you a real man, John Watson?”

John sighs.

Just say it.

“Not yet.”

Harry throws a sloppy punch at his head that misses the mark entirely.

“Just get _out_ of here, _please,_ just leave me _alone._ ”

Survival Tactics 210.

\---

The army is the army is the army.

John is able to attend to the wounds of six soldiers and admit to three lost causes before he begins to die. Lying on the ground, dirt in his mouth, he clutches his arm and waits quietly.

_Please, God, not again._

\---

John wakes in a graveyard. He’s dead? Unlikely. But maybe. But unlikely. The scenery is a little smudged, the colors a little grey, his stomach a little turned; he’s been poisoned? Unlikely. But maybe. But unlikely.

_Where am I?_

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

The tombstone stands brazenly before him as Mary’s hand knits with his.

Time, space, and everything comes to a standstill.

He hadn’t knows it was possible to fuck things up quite so badly.

_But we meant well._

\---

Sitting on a large bed in a room both familiar and strange, in a house both welcoming and inhospitable, John places his head between his knees and holds his hands over his ears as he wills the world around him to stop spinning quite so fast.

How many times before has he jumped _forward?_

This is the first, probably. Or the twenty-seventh.

Is Sherlock still alive, then? Secretly, somewhere, hiding out, biding his time, making a bad decision over and over again every day that he doesn’t tell John to just hold on a little longer, everything will be alright in the end.

(It will, won’t it?)

Have they even met This Time Around? John tried to avoid him, tried so hard to do right by him because maybe this way things will turn out alright, maybe this way he’ll survive (the most important thing), maybe if we never meet and I don’t strap him to the table to send 500 volts into his brain without his permission, maybe then he’ll have a chance to live without farce, to live the life he was truly meant to—

Meaning what, exactly?

What a presumptuous notion, John. “Meant to live,” have you learned nothing from all of this?

Sitting on a large bed both comforting and vile, John trembles and clutches at the duvet as his heart pounds out of his chest.

What use is all this speculation, all this wishing and wanting and hoping and dreaming? Mary is here now, just as she always has been (always will be); Sherlock is an indeterminate state, maybe yes maybe no, but Mary is here, Mary is real and present and definite. Mary is the only thing he knows, the only thing he can be sure of.

He should tell her. Everything.

And yet, and yet.

That has never been an option.

It’s too personal, too private. It needs to be _lived,_ it needs to be _suffered_ and _survived,_ not talked about and explained in not enough detail.

(You told _Sherlock,_ didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU?)

Yes, yes, a thousand times or more, and there was no other option, no other _way—_

(There is _always_ another way, if you would only _look,_ if you could only _see._ )

“John?”

He hates her, he hates her.

He needs her so badly.

“John, darling, is everything okay?”

There will never be another opportunity as perfect as this one.

Obvious.

John grimaces and pats the covers down, hopes she’ll understand; she sits beside him with her hand on his shoulder and he doesn’t shrug her off. Dead weight, he’s dead weight, not sinking, not floating, going nowhere. The battery is dead, the clock has stopped (time along with it).

Say it now.

(I’m sorry to be breaking your heart.)

“Mary.”

She smiles her coquettish little smile and yes, this is it; everything other than has just been a mistake.

Make it right.

“The…the graveyard was harder than I thought it would be.”

Oh, look. There’s another.

Her smiles slips away by deadly degrees.

“John.”

Yes, dear?

“John…how many times have you traveled through time?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The maximum recommended strength for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, a.k.a. shock therapy) is 450 volts, though treatment typically doesn't stray from 200-220 volts.


	12. divulgation

_Blindsided._

Yes, that’s the word. It’s a blow to the head. Up is down and right is left, colors inverted and sounds playing in reverse order.

_You aren’t supposed to be here._

This is mine. Get out.

What a nice double standard you’ve written up for yourself, John Watson.

Mary watches him intently and he remembers that he’s never wanted to be the center of anything, never wanted anyone’s world to revolve around him. Just a part of something bigger, a piece that fits into many places in the puzzle depending on the time, the place, the position of the stars in the sky. Type O Negative, for emergency use only.

“I don’t, know,” so it falls down in broken pieces, cracking on the way out of his mouth, cuts his gums with its sharp edges. Mary’s hand on his shoulder grips tighter and he doesn’t shrug her off (but please, would you please, leave this burden off my back).

“Think,” she presses; he closes his eyes.

“Four?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I don’t know!”

Oh, dear; didn’t mean to yell. Sorry about that, I know you’re only trying to help.

It doesn’t matter; she didn’t notice, doesn’t care. (Please do.

(But quietly.)

“But you know what I’m talking about,” she takes for granted, which he does. “So it must have been quite a few; don’t you have a guess? An estimate?”

What? What? Nothing you’re saying makes any sense, you need to speak in straighter lines. Brighter colors, sharper edges.

“Four,” he says, because—because. She nods slowly and god, he hates her so much.

“Four that you know of,” she corrects. Why didn’t we start there, if you already knew the answer? Haven’t I been through enough? How much is enough for you? Do I have to lie bleeding on the floor, the knife standing in my back before you’ll admit that we’ve gone too far?

“Yes,” he says. It doesn’t matter.

Oh, but wait.

“And you?”

This is important; you made it so. She smiles a wry little smile and he watches out of the corner of his eye as she shakes her head.

“I’ve lost track by now,” as if it’s all the same in the end. It all washes out in the light of day, don’t you know that? Don’t you know by now?

He scrubs the blood out of his eyes and off of his cheeks and smiles as though something is funny. What happened to all of this? Where did the path spiral so violently out of the way? It doesn’t matter, of course. What’s done is done.

She loosens her grip and slides her arm around his shoulders.

“You and I are two of a kind, John.” Her fingers warm his skin through the fabric of his shirt. “You must know that.”

I do, I do. Of course I do.

He laughs, an uproarious sound that comes out a hollow shudder.

“Did you know Maria?”

Who?

Mary’s brow furrows worriedly and she raises her hand to his neck, the side of his face. “Should I have?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s not important.”

These words fill the empty spaces without having any particular meaning.

Silence reigns for a small eternity before Mary stands, places herself in front of him as though she belongs there, or anywhere.

“You don’t know how this works, do you.”

“You do?” he retorts, and she smirks, her arms folded across her chest. Sit quietly and listen now; this is a secret, and you mustn’t tell.

“You’ve feared for you life before, haven’t you?” she asks, as though of course, hasn’t everyone?

“I went off to war,” he reminds her. “I know about that part, death causing the jumps. I figured that bit out on my own.”

At least mostly.

Mary scowls, unimpressed. (What part of “quietly” did you misunderstand?)

“Did you figure out that your ability to remember each life you inhabit increases with each ‘jump’?” she asks as though he ought to know the proper word for it, but she’ll stoop to his level for now, plebeian.

No, the answer is no, but the answer is also of course, it’s the only thing that makes sense. The answer is “Sherlock would have gotten there.” (Sherlock _did_ get there, John remembers, but he isn’t sure he didn’t just imagine it, so it doesn't count.) The answer is “If I’d had enough time.” (John, John, John. You have nothing _but_ time.)

“I hadn’t thought about that part,” he says, which is an answer and not an answer in one, and also a lie, but only technically.

Mary hums disdainfully, puts her hands on her hips. “Children are much more easily frightened, prone to thinking their lives are in danger in ridiculous situations,” she observes. “As a boy, you might have jumped dozens of times without knowing it, any time you were afraid of the dark or a loud noise in an empty house.” Her mouth twists up on one side, makes her eyes crinkle at the corners; this will be a joke just for her, sorry you’ll be in the way. “Built up a lot of credit, you might say, when the stakes were low.”

It isn’t funny, but then, we knew that.

“It’s important now?”

After all, he couldn’t change the only thing that mattered (but he tried so very hard).

No no, don’t forget: This is now. Pull up your stakes and carry on.

Mary sits beside him, grips the edge of the bed with her white knuckles, her shoulders hunched, her gaze fixed as she waits for him to turn.

“I’ve been search for a very long time,” she says. He watches her lips form the words, watches her eyes dart around his face. “I’ve been searching for _you,_ ” she says. It’s nice to feel wanted. “And now I’ve found you, now we’re together,” she says. All the pieces have fallen together into place.

She releases the duvet, puts her hand over his. This is a gesture of love.

“All the pieces I couldn’t find, everything you never understood, we’ll figure it out, all of it. Together. We don’t need anyone else.”

It’s nice to feel wanted.


	13. zero times

Time passes at a crawling pace that John has heard about but never quite experienced.

Life is much the same as it ever was, as it ever has been; every now and again, John remembers that he’s only lived here for a few days, but then the days turn to weeks, which turn to a month, and he relearns how to navigate conversations about the scenes everybody remembers him performing in but that he hasn’t read. If Mary’s learned anything new about their situation, picked up any new pieces, she hasn’t shared, but nor has she asked him what he’s found; the answer, of course, is “nothing,” so it’s all for the best.

He checks the calendar every morning, which probably doesn’t help.

One month left.

John hasn’t bought the ring yet. He’ll get to it.

But will Sherlock be there?

Oh, John.

Stop trying to twist the passage of time; this is the labyrinth from which no one can return.

\---

“I’ve done some terrible things,” Mary says one night without a trace of remorse as they lie in bed and look up at the ceiling. John would like to say he’s surprised, but there’s not much point to it.

“Do you think you could still love me,” Mary asks, “if you knew what they were?”

Love, is that what this is? That’s a bit disappointing.

“I’m sure I could,” John says dutifully. “I’ve done some things I’m not especially proud of.”

Mary hums a stilted sound and clasps his hand, interlacing their fingers, and John wastes a moment wondering what sorts of things she’s talking about before he forgets why it matters.

Breathe in, breathe out.

\---

Four days later, Mary slips into John’s office during his lunch break and sits on his examining table with a funny sort of light in her eyes.

He’ll have to replace the paper lining now, and she isn’t even sick. What a waste.

“John,” she says, fighting a smile. “Have you ever tried to jump to a certain time? A certain place?”

He puts his soup down on his desk and leans back in his chair.

“I don’t think I’ve ever jumped on purpose,” he admits, “much less made any effort to control the destination.”

Her eyes crinkle at the corners for a second as she becomes a bit giddy. “Where would you want to go?”

He looks away under the guise of being thoughtful.

Do you think you could still love me, if you knew what my answer was?

“I suppose it depends on what I’d want to accomplish,” he decides, committing to precisely nothing. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“I would have met you much earlier,” she says; he has the feeling she wasn’t listening to his answer anyway. “Just think of all we could’ve done in the hours that we lost, everything we could have achieved by now if only we had known one another years ago.”

Probably that should have been his answer, too.

“Why do you ask,” he says patiently, which seems to startle her.

“I think it’s possible,” she says. “I think it can be done, if the two of us try to go together to the same place, the same time. I think that in combination, we’re enough to control it.”

She leans forward with her manic grin.

“Where would you want to go?”

His eyes lose focus as he trains them on his desk calendar.

_Anywhere but here._

\---

Every day, Mary asks him the same question.

“Where should we go first?”

Every day, John offers the same excuse.

“I need more time.”

It’s not a remotely good excuse to begin with, and clumsily worded besides, but Mary is ceaselessly patient; as long as we’re together now, she says, I can give you as much time as you need. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here.

One more week.

John makes the reservation after work. He hasn’t bought the ring yet.

He’ll get to it.

\---

The Landmark Hotel.

Fitting, isn’t it? This is a landmark event.

(Did you remember to invite Mary?)

Yes, yes, she’s just upstairs. Wants to make her entrance. Everything is fine.

What if Sherlock doesn’t come?

_I don’t have it in me to wait._

What if he does?

_I’ve made up my plan of escape._

John wants to turn around, is dying to keep his eye on the door, let’s do it right (now that we have the chance) because no one else remembers That Other Night so it didn’t _really_ happen.

Mary didn’t understand, so that doesn’t count.

(Be silent.)

Mary glides down the towering staircase and sits across from him, smiling her coquettish little smile and god, please let’s do it right this time.

“I’ve made my decision,” she says secretly, putting her hands in her lap and leaning forward just a bit. “I would choose this moment to return to, I would relive it as many times as I could. The beginning of love, isn’t it? The beginning of a new life. Together, I mean.”

John’s heart is leaden, his stomach twisted in knots.

_That should be my answer too._

You’ve always known it wasn’t real.

_This is the history of life as we know it._

He places the red velvet box on the table, gives it a half turn, and sighs. She smiles giddily, devoid of farce. (That’s all this is.)

“Mary.”

The wine glasses are empty; he sits and he waits.

Her ceaseless patience is wearing thin.

“Go on,” she prompts, and he smiles sourly at the shape of everything they’ve become.

“You know what I’m going to say.”

“Oh, come on now,” she goads. “Pretend I don’t know why we’re here, pretend it’s a surprise. Just a bit of fun, isn’t it, come on.”

This is the moment she’s chosen to relive for all of eternity.

It makes a strange kind of sense in a strange kind of way; how many times can we reshape this magical experience? How many different kinds of wonderful can it become? How much joy can we wring out of this instant before it becomes tired and cold? How much blood can be drawn from this stone?

(Believe me, your loneliness won’t go away.)

SUICIDE OF FAKE GENIUS.

“Sir.”

_Ad infinitum._

The story without an ending spins back to its beginning.


	14. unary game

John knows how things go from here.

Last time, the first time (if so), everything was new, the surprise was surprising; this time, John comes unwittingly prepared.

“Oh my god,” Mary says, and John doesn’t think her shock is feigned (although she should know how things go from here).

“Not quite,” Sherlock replies with an awkward smile that looks like a grimace as Mary’s surprise turns to spite. ( _We’re the gods here, don’t forget._ )

(Not really.)

“You died,” Mary insists. “You jumped off a roof.”

John remembers.

“No,” Sherlock corrects.

Yes.

“You’re _dead!_ ”

You ought to be.

Reliving the moment doesn’t make it any easier; John had thought it might, somehow. Second time around. No—no, of course not. What a silly thought.

“No,” Sherlock says again—this is the part where he tries to be funny. (John grits his teeth.) “I’m quite sure,” Sherlock says as he fights back his dreadful little smile, “I checked.”

John lunges from his seat, wraps his hands around Sherlock’s throat and squeezes, squeezes until he can feel the larynx, digs his thumbs into the suprasternal notch.

_How could you._

Sherlock lifts Mary’s napkin from the table and dips it in her water glass, dabs the fake moustache off his face.

“Do you have any idea,” Mary seethes, “any _idea_ what you’ve done? To him?” she tacks on at the last moment.

“John,” Sherlock says, looking at his shoes, ignoring Mary to the best of his ability, “I’m suddenly realizing I owe you some sort of an apology.”

This is the moment John wants to relive for all eternity.

Mary touches his wrist.

“John?”

The weight of everything she isn’t saying packs his chest with water and collapses his lungs.

_This is everything we’re fighting against._

Sherlock is drowning, drowning, and John is powerless to save him.

_Now do you understand?_

Take my hand, Sherlock, please will you do this for me?

_Can you see this world the way I always have?_

I tried so hard to keep from ever landing back at this place.

How long has it been this time?

(How long is long enough?)

“Sherlock,” because he needs to understand. “Do you have _any_ idea…”

Well that’s not fair.

(You say that as though anything has ever been.)

Sherlock winces, recoils, which is necessary and gratifying but not enough, never enough.

“Two years, Sherlock.”

It was, wasn’t it? Yes, that sounds about right. All things being equal.

“John,” Mary warns, but that hardly matters now.

John lunges to his feet, grabs the hair on top of Sherlock’s head and smashes his face against the table, the plates, the silverware, leaves him bleeding, getting it all over everything, dripping on the floor, the walls, the ceiling.

“Two years,” he says again, just to be sure. Sherlock bites his lip.

“John— I—”

“For two years I thought you were _dead,_ ” John interrupts, pushing himself up to his feet with the force of his slamming fists.

Everything would be so much easier if we buried it quickly underground, watched it take root and turn to grass and weeds. (We could never hope to be fast enough.)

“Wait,” Sherlock begs—yes, this is the part where he becomes desperate, though the wording is a little off. John tries to calm his breathing, to flatten out the feral panting, even though he has every right to it.

Sherlock is about to make another joke, about to make another mistake, and John should let him, he really should because he deserves it, he deserves to fuck up so badly it takes another two years to recover,

but—

“ _Shut up._ ”

Sherlock presses his lips together.

John wants to deck him, so he does.

Mary puts her hand over her mouth and does a decent job of looking scandalized.

\---

John walks the halls of the hospital with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ceiling, doctors nurses patients leaping out of his way with sour glances and vile curses on his name. The fluorescent lights hum hypnotically and his shoes leave prints in the filth painting the floor; the earphones in his ears play the trill of a steady heart monitor on repeat, useless and droning, as dying patients trudge through the walls indifferently.

_Kill me,_ he tells the faceless crowds. _Make me one of you._

A kindhearted little girl in a white and yellow dress straps an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and fades away before John can say thank you.

Any moment now, John will wake in another place where nothing has been ruined. A place of maybe yes maybe no. A place of infinite possibilities.

All roads lead to this.

Everything will be alright in the morning.

“Darling,” Mary says as she lays her hand on his arm. “Just…please, be careful. I don’t want to see you hurt again.”

Sherlock stands with his hands clasped behind his back, staring through the barred window of a condemned penitentiary, giving them a moment.

“I’ll always be here for you, no matter what happens,” Mary says, tightening her grip. “I will always find my way to you, so don’t be afraid. Alright?”

Do you believe the words you’re saying?

“I tried to stay away,” John says as though something is funny. “I tried to live my life differently than I ever had before, I thought I— I thought that if all the little choices were different, somehow that would make the big ones different too, I thought that somehow I could…I could rewrite, all of this.”

Not often, but for the moment.

“Oh, darling, _no,_ ” Mary says in such a way that he knows it’s supposed to be a comfort. “You and I were always meant to find each other, no matter where—or when. Constant points amidst all this change, don’t you see? The one thing we can always count on is each other.”

John takes her hand off his arm and drifts into boundless space, touching stars and disintegrating piece by piece.

“It hasn’t always been this way.”

I would have remembered.

Mary smiles shyly, turns her face away. “It took us a little while to converge, perhaps, but now that we’ve met once…well.” Her eyes lock with his, fishing line around his neck reining him in to her. “We know better now, don’t we.”

Sherlock stands on the other side of the bars, looking out at the world sprawled before him with a contemplative sort of moroseness.

This photograph was taken without John’s consent.


	15. transporter room

This is the first time as long as we both shall live that it’s rained on this night.

John wipes seawater from his eyes and flicks it down the drain, into the sewers.

Mary steps closer, holding her hands to her chest in just the right shape to cradle a small bird.

“Shall we go home?” she asks (instructions, not suggestion).

_Yours is not a silent devotion._

They should go home. The streets aren’t crowded but the sounds of the storm make it difficult to hear; his wet clothes are a heavy distraction, a dim reminder of what he expected this night to be (and what was that again).

But he is both an old man and a child, infinitely confident and off-balance with uncertainty, knowledgeable beyond his years and profoundly ignorant of all things, and going home is a funny idea which has no form to it. Where are we to go, to that house? That room with the bed? The bloodied pavement in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College? Somewhere constant, somewhere that repeats. Yes, yes, yes, any of those, all of those. Let’s go to all of them at once, that’s something we could accomplish.

John walks instead to a pub with a harpoon posted over the door and a menu of paper delicacies and sits at the table closest to the window, staring at his hands.

Quietly, carefully, soothing a wounded animal, Mary enters and sits across from him as Sherlock takes his place behind the bar and puts the kettle on.

Laying her hand on the table, Mary edges it towards him.

Not until we’re ready.

“Darling?”

_Get on with it._

John takes a breath and meets her gaze blindly.

“How many times have we met?”

Her eyes widen (slightly briefly) and her hand pauses its crawl; she’s surprised, which is a very nice place to start.

“I…I don’t know,” she says. “I feel as though I’ve known you forever.”

How romantic, my dear.

Please be patient with me.

“You’re not answering my question.”

She nods, yes, I know, and he rests his hands on the tabletop, folded, clenched tight.

“We’ve only met the twice,” she says eventually. “I knew about you…beforehand, before I took the job at the clinic.”

“You followed me there.”

She lowers her eyes; this is a shameful act, I agree. Show me that you understand.

“I’m sorry.” Her sigh has a little hitch to it, a little laughter. “I was so nervous to meet someone else like me, someone who might understand, I— Oh.” A self-deprecating sniff, this is funny now, let’s all look back at how silly we were. “I suppose I thought I might frighten you away if I said too much too quickly.”

It’s even understandable.

“I’m so sorry, darling, I should have known you were stronger than that.”

A whistle and a click.

Shuffle, shuffle.

Sherlock places the tea tray between them and loses his sense of purpose.

“You’re probably right,” John allows as he draws the teapot toward himself and leaves the cups. “I don’t know what I would have said if you’d sprung this on me from the start.”

“Yes,” Mary says eagerly, “of course, I was only trying to protect you. You and I have a very special bond, you see.”

John grinds his teeth to sharpen the fangs.

“Darling,” she murmurs—here it comes, time for the kill shot. “We need each other to move forward, to keep from getting stuck anywhere, living the same rote over and over again. We’ve become fixed to the same places and we need each other to live beyond them, to have any sort of _future._ ”

Which of these choices is an illusion?

John replaces the teapot and takes one of the empty cups.

“There’s so much suffering in the world,” she goes on. “You know. You’ve seen it.”

_I live it._

Step out of where you don’t belong (she doesn’t, she won’t).

“You and I can survive it, together, we can get through anything.”

So earnest.

The words between the lines become blurred, but he reads them.

_We can fly away when things become too hard._

(We can choose to run from that which would seek to hurt us.)

_We can not only survive but live in a most beautiful of places._

(We can customize our suffering and throw away everything that doesn’t suit us.)

What a life that would be.

“And what kind of future is that?” he asks, looking out the window to the streets made of glass. Her reflection looks to him, burns a hole through the brittle panes.

“It’s a future that doesn’t stop,” she says reverently.

Something simple, and everything becomes clear.

Isn’t it awful how we want the same things in such disparate ways?

(Sherlock sits on the counter, watching them impassively; John wishes for his mind to be written out long form, bound in stiff leather with neat stitches and published in limited editions.)

“We’ve worked so hard for this,” she says (a constant refrain). “I can’t just give up now; can you?”

When you put it in those words.

But how, how disparate is this present?

“What work?” he asks, because he’s never been particularly remarkable. (Everything he’s ever done is the accomplishment of a jigsaw puzzle of a man he only knows in part, so it doesn’t count.)

She bites her lip; should I tell you? Is now the time?

(That rather takes the sport out of it, wouldn’t you say?)

“You said, once,” she says with some hesitation (manufactured, thanks for the consideration), “that you wanted things to go differently; you wanted to live without farce. You wanted everything to be real.”

Did I? I don’t remember.

“I tried to help you.”

_I never wanted to see you suffer._

“I did everything I could to bring us here.”

_Don’t you want the same for me?_

Yes, but.

John turns from the melted window; there’s Sherlock on his perch, waiting for his invitation, hoping for anything and expecting nothing. There’s Mary in her chair, waiting for his reply, expecting her due and hoping for everything.

Turning the cups upside down, John sits up straight and plants his feet firmly on the floor (assume the crash position).

“What did you do?”

There’s a giddiness in Mary’s eyes too difficult to hide.

“Well you took the door on the right, didn’t you?”


	16. confession

There’s a building on the left and a building on the right.

The balance beam John’s chair teeters on narrows to a knotted thread and blood rushes to his head as he struggles to understand. Surely, surely not. Everything he’s been through, over and over again, his fragile roots aren’t going to be pulled by something so fickle.

(Remember when we started this?)

John clenches his left hand into a fist, relaxes it and presses his fingertips to the tabletop.

“You said,” he intones, “you knew about me before we met at the clinic.”

“Yes,” Mary agrees.

That’s all you have to say?

He smiles tightly. “Exactly how long ‘before’ would that have been?”

“Who could say,” she dismisses, “I’ve given up on keeping track, haven’t you?”

Oh, no no. You’re not getting away with that again.

“How long?”

Finally, her confidence, her brazenness stalls; no, my dear, I won’t let you slide through these cracks. She clenches her right fist in a slightly wrong mimicry and he bites down on his tongue, tastes a bitter line of blood.

“You knew.”

Oh, Sherlock. I’m sorry you’ve been drawn into all of this.

Mary narrows her eyes and slides him a sour glare.

“You knew all along,” Sherlock goes on heedlessly. “You knew about everything.”

“So what if I did?” she asks thinly. “You’ve dragged him down long enough. I’ve always been willing to wait as long as it takes.”

(Remember what you said?)

“John needs me,” she insists, “and I’ll always be there for him.”

Oh, god.

He doesn’t want to hear all of this, doesn’t want to hear any of it.

And yet, and yet.

“What did you do?”

She bites her lip and lowers her eyes (he used to find it so endearing).

“I did what I had to do to protect you.” (She meets his eyes then but he knows this game, recognizes the push.) “You can accomplish an awful lot when you know what’s going to happen next.”

He doesn’t want to hear it.

“What. Did. You. Do.”

He doesn’t want to know.

She pauses, the carpet yanked from under her, and he looks for the moment she decides to regain her advantage. Watching, waiting—yes, there, there it is. Right on time.

Leaning forward at the waist, she places her hand atop his fist, then the other on top of that; stay, please, my love, and listen to this tale. Listen to my story and maybe then you’ll understand.

“Do you remember how you two met?”

Sherlock watches John curiously. (He has a feeling the answer is “no”; well, that’s almost right.)

“The clinic,” John says without fear (he feels it down deep). Mary nods and rubs his hands gently.

“And the next time you tried to meet him at the clinic, do you remember what they said?”

Thank you, Mr. Radar Man, for the butterflies you gifted me.

“They wouldn’t tell me if he was there or not.”

She smiles as though this is an accomplishment.

“And then what?”

That which we are, we are.

“I went to Afghanistan, and when I came back, Mike Stamford introduced us at Barts.”

She nods, rubs his hands gently.

“And then what?”

Don’t beg the question this time.

“I picked the door on the right.”

Her rueful smile fills him with a sort of rottenness.

“I’m sorry that there was nothing I could do after you chose right the first time; every time after that you knew what would happen, _you_ decided to go to the left.” Her fingers wrap around his, clutching desperately as she melts them together. “But I tried, I tried to give you what you wanted, to protect you until it was the right time for us to meet.”

Nothing makes sense.

( _False._ )

Nearly everything makes sense.

John would very much prefer to try again; that’s not really an option anymore, is it?

“Life has been good since then, hasn’t it?” she coaches. “You and I have had fun together.”

And whose fault is that?

“I didn’t exactly have a choice, did I?”

She smiles like she can’t help it. “You didn’t have any choice but to have fun?”

He jerks his hand away; the teapot falls to the floor, and the cups, and Sherlock winces (sorry about that; I really did appreciate the gesture).

“Don’t do that.”

An unfamiliar sort of expression colors her features; what is that? Something cold, something sallow and dark. Regret?

Doubt.

Oh dear.

“But darling…”

“Don’t say it.”

_I only wanted what was best for you._

“Isn’t this what you wanted?”

Deception. Malice aforethought.

Good intentions.

“You thought I wanted him to die?”

She raises her eyebrows (don’t make me put it to words)

_Didn’t you?_

(but I will if that’s what you need).

“You wanted something simple; you wanted to stay away from him, you wanted to be safe. You deserve it, after everything you’ve suffered through. I was trying to give you that.”

They need to go. Everything, all of it needs to stop, _pause,_ **SHUT UP,** just give me a moment, just a _moment—_

“You’re lying.”

God, Sherlock, don’t tell me anything more.

This is Mary’s show, though, or so she’s decided; her swallowtail wings are bright latticework patches in the dark and she stands, holding her fists on the table as she turns to Sherlock with murder in her eyes even though he won’t be cowed (and she knows it, too).

“You’re one to talk.”

This is worse.

“John,” Mary says (desperately, desperately), “John, listen to me, please. I can give you the one thing he never will, don’t you understand? I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you, I’m was only trying to help,” (you don’t know, you don’t know) “but you have to know that what you want, what I want, it’s the same; I can give you the peace you’ve been looking for, I can give you the satisfaction you’ve never been able to find on your own.” She bends forward, takes his hands again (cold, so cold). “Do you understand? Tell me you understand, John, please, let’s finish this together.”

The thread balancing his chair threatens to snap, he feels it stretching tighter from end to end as the ground quivers under his feet, his vision blurring under the gossamer lights everyone god just _shut up shut up SHUT UP—_

\---

John sits in a white room filled with black silhouettes.

One.

Two.

Three.

_You’ll be the one to hold the gun,_ they murmur in his ear. _You know it well._

What is it that I want?

They sigh and shake their heads. It’s fine; he expected nothing less.

Things are getting out of hand.


	17. power room

Daylight.

John should be at work. John should be sitting at his desk in his office with a stethoscope around his neck, saying things like “Put on the gown and sit on the table” and “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue” and “We’re going to have to re-break that bone so shut up sit still and maybe stop jumping off of high places.”

Mary is there, at work; there are other doctors in the office and she has things to do. Sarah Sawyer appreciates her attendance, surely; anything to help pick up the slack left by that lazy Doctor Watson.

John sits on a large bed both comfortable and vile and thinks about going away and never coming back.

_Can’t do that._

I know.

I know.

_When would you like to go today?_

Everywhere but here.

\---

John bangs on the door of 221B Baker Street, tries to break it down; Sherlock won’t appreciate it, but then, Sherlock probably won’t mind at all. _Just one of those things, I suppose._ It isn’t necessary, anyway, as the door is unlocked, maybe just for him.

John bangs on the door of 221B Baker Street.

All things solid, all things real are a precious commodity, and he needs to hold on tight when he finds them.

He takes the stairs two at a time going up, one at a time going back, arriving at the landing only a short time after he ought. Sherlock’s door is open wide and a grey cloud hangs from the ceiling, suspended by a fishing net.

“Sherlock,” John says loudly. His voice echoes off the papered walls, ricocheting in between the pots and pans and Erlenmeyer flasks and Bunsen burners (John has been here before).

When he turns back around, Sherlock sits in his chair, His Chair opposite John’s Chair, which hasn’t been for a long time (maybe forever) but hasn’t yet stopped being (maybe never). John takes his place and sits up straight.

_I’m happy to tell you that I’ve been quite depressed since your death._

Sherlock holds a cigarette to his lips and inhales deeply, whistling a rainbow toward the windows.

John sits on his swing, rocking his legs back and forth.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Sherlock asks, throwing the cigarette into the fireplace and looking at the floor.

John bows his spine against the crushing press of everything he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t know how,” he replies. Sherlock nods.

“John,” Sherlock says, pulling on the rope that draws John’s attention to him as everything outside of this building, this flat, this room fades to white behind him, around them.

_Let’s hear it for everything I’ve kept bottled up inside._

“Sherlock,” John says, which is enough for now.

Sherlock blinks his reddened eyes and John hopes he isn’t crying (though perhaps he ought to be).

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says, and his voice is even and clear. “I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you through. You deserve much better than this.”

Well that’s not true. But thank you for playing, even though you didn’t read the rules.

“That was awful,” John says. “What you did to me.”

Sherlock’s next breath is a shuddering sigh; John hopes he isn’t crying (but not too much).

“I forgive you,” John says, because one of them ought to learn how to move on and it might as well be him.

Three cheers for the worst among us. ( _I, too, would like to run away._ )

“Don’t leave me again,” John says, because even once more would be one time too many.

It would be a lovely promise if you could keep it.

\---

Daylight.

John hasn’t slept in weeks. (He knows this to be false, but it feels true and so he excuses himself with it.)

Mary is tired of waiting.

She sits at the kitchen table with his hand clasped between hers, a dead weight, and he thinks about all this and a happy ending, too.

“John,” she says softly, sincerely. “I didn’t mean for you to be hurt. You must understand, I never expected him to survive the rooftop; that was why I kept you here, the first time, so you could move on. So we could move on. Together.”

I went to see him again yesterday.

He told me a fantastic story about a past that I wasn’t to be accountable for, and I loved him all the more for it.

“Do you understand?” she asks, needing to hear _yes,_ needing to hear _always, of course._

John looks her in the eye.

“What were we to move on to?” he asks, which makes her flinch ( _don’t make me say it_ ). She thinks they’re of one mind in this regard, assumes they always have been; shouldn’t we be, now that you know the situation we’re in? Now that I’ve told you nearly everything that matters?

“You know,” she tries, and he might, but isn’t sure. “A life simple and uncomplicated, a life with a middle and an ending instead of infinite beginnings.”

Yes. Yes, he thought as much.

“You don’t want to save the world?” he asks spitefully, because she seems like the type for such grandiosity and he would prefer not to think about the polar opposite. She smiles as though he’s said something naïve, something stupid, but it’s okay, it’s okay, because he’ll see in the end that this is what’s real.

“One person can’t accomplish all that, John, no matter how many times they relive it. You should know better.”

He should. He does.

“So you chose to try and save me instead?” he asks as though the two might ever have been equivalent. She squeezes his hand between hers and her eyes crease at the corners, a smile without the smile.

“You and I are one and the same, darling,” she confides (though he already knows it well). “I need you just as much as you needed me.”

Selfish, selfish.

“You know this is the only way out for us,” she says. “You and I can live, just us, together, we can look out for one another and keep things from going too far. Someday we’ll come to the end of our lives and we’ll see what awaits us there, and I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

All our choices narrowed down to one.

John stands, takes back his hand.

“You lied to me,” he says plainly. “Every time you didn’t come forward, every time you watched me from the corners, from out of the dark and didn’t say anything, every time you let me think I was living by my own decisions, you lied to me.”

She isn’t blind, he knows it well; she’ll understand all he means.

“So did he.”

Yes; well played.

“I could kill you,” he says, just because. She rolls her eyes.

“And what would that accomplish?”

No point to it, really.

“I don’t know. Just to see what would happen.”

A coldness overtakes her that he’s never seen before, a dark sort of malaise as she crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. Sparring equals, that’s what they are now; she doesn’t seem to like it.

“I’d like to see you try to live out your life with him,” she mocks. “Danger around every corner, you’d fall into a hundred more lives before you survived a day.”

Yes, probably.

But they would be my mistakes.

“We’d figure it out,” he declares.

She taps her nails against the tabletop, the rhythm uneven and unsatisfying.

“I’ll always be here,” she threatens. “You know that.”

_I hope you find the will to follow through._

John closes the door behind him.

The morning is over, and day has just begun.


	18. Aftermath

John walks the stepping stone path down Baker Street to Two Two One B, stopping short in front of the amorphous barricade. This is the door of dream and illusion, a bubble and a shadow. This is the cord tying all things together, the glass surface upon which everything is balanced.

This is that door.

John takes a deep breath and isn’t ready. Then again, what do they always say? Whoever they are, they seem to be quite wise, and should be listened to when they speak. They say to do things which frighten you, to take risks which are terrifying.

John walks through the door.

“Sherlock?” he calls as he hops up the stairs (one, two, one, two, one). “Sherlock!”

A hazardous tangle of chains hangs across the entrance to the flat. Closing his eyes, John walks through them without pause.

The golden fox perches atop the bookcase and bares its fangs in a salacious smile.

_I’ve been missing you, my friend._

“John.”

Sherlock raises his glass and nods his respect; John sits on his swing, rocking his legs back and forth.

Here at the beginning of all things, we find our resting place.

“Sherlock.” John meets Sherlock’s gaze evenly, feels the electromagnetic radiation oscillating past him on all sides. _I apologize in advance for this disruption._ “Sherlock, you are my fixed point. You are the constant I find in every life.”

Looking into the fireplace, Sherlock nods and sips his wine. It’s not a comforting response, but John elects to have faith; Sherlock has never disappointed him yet. (Come now, that’s not true.)

“And Mary?” Sherlock asks the ashes. John turns to them as well, unable to see any answers hidden there, and wonders what sort of life he’s led up to now. What sort of man Sherlock knows him to be this time around.

“We’ll find a way,” he says, and what he means is: We’ll outrun the past. We’ll defeat the ghosts nipping at our heels, we’ll craft a new narrative built on common themes yet undiscovered. Sherlock laughs as though he can’t help it, a burst of sound quickly quelled but which leaves a smile on his lips.

“There’s been a distinct absence of interesting cases the last few days,” Sherlock announces. “They seem to be rather spare when you’re not around.”

Flatterer.

“And what have you been doing in the meantime?” John asks.

Sherlock shakes his head.

“I have a theory,” he says. John leans forward with his hands in his lap, anticipating greatness.

“All floating ships need an anchor,” he says, and John nods. “Pull the anchor, saw off the chain, and the ship is set adrift in an endless sea.”

“I don’t know that we should kill her right away,” John warns, and Sherlock scoffs indignantly.

“Of course not,” he agrees. “I imagine we both would rather wash our hands of her than intertwine our lives any further than they already have been. But has it never occurred to you that you jump across many lives, many times, and always _look_ the same?”

It’s never seemed strange, in fact; as a medical man, John should have found it improbable to the point of impossibility.

“If we destroy the vessel,” John ventures, and Sherlock nods.

“She’ll be able to flee to anywhere but here.”

“But only as a last resort,” John asserts, and Sherlock shrugs.

“It’s only a theory, after all.”

It’s a great comfort, John thinks. It’s nice to know these are the things occupying your mind. At the moment, however, I must warn you that it’s the least important factor in this knotted mess of tapestry and thread.

The sage whispers the question in his ear and it echoes in his mouth.

“I need you,” he says. “Mary might think I root her, or however she understands it, but as for me, it’s always been you.”

Sherlock sighs through his teeth. If he’s been expecting this, he did a poor job of preparing for it. (To be fair, he did the best he could.)

“I’m sure it’s nothing like what you expected,” Sherlock says, and John wants to thank him for not apologizing again.

He doesn’t, of course.

“I should be the one saying that to you,” he replies. “You don’t have to stay, you know. Just because I keep finding you, I keep getting you stuck in the middle of this disaster doesn’t mean you have to stay.”

I would like it if you would, but I will understand if you won’t.

Consider this the contents of the letter I never managed to write with my skeletal hand and a working pen.

Sherlock draws himself up out of his chair and towers over his kingdom. There’s no room for such moroseness in this place of solutions, this house of answers.

“Mary’s skills are superior to yours,” he says, a depressing reminder. John frowns and Sherlock goes on heedlessly: “However the fact that she has managed to build her box of tricks means that it’s _possible._ She prevented you from jumping back at a time during which you should have done so merely because she was able to anticipate that you would; she followed you, the same you, through many different worlds, keeping track and making changes. Shouldn’t you have even better control over yourself?”

“I’ve never done that before,” John reminds him, but Sherlock isn’t bothered.

“You simply need to remember that I would never let you die, and everything will be fine.”

Simple.

There’s a rumor going around that John doesn’t belong anywhere; trying to find a place in this world is a fool’s errand.

“There may be more to it than that,” John says. Sherlock steps in front of him and pulls him up by his wrists.

“Very well, then,” he replies. They stand defiantly, chest to chest, and think of similar things in different ways.

I kind of remember the feeling of waking up to you (John feels the sensation deep in his bones) though I personally am nothing of note.

“This will be a dangerous place,” Sherlock says. “We aren’t the men we think we are, you and I; everything has been changed in small ways by every different choice.”

“We keep finding our way back,” John replies, and Sherlock smiles a small placeholder.

“We’ll do the best we can.”

I wonder if anyone knows where we’ve been.

“You’re putting a lot of faith in me,” John warns. “I might not be able to stay.”

Sherlock looks away and gathers his thoughts.

“And how miserable do you think it would be,” he proposes when he’s through, “to live a life of no surprises?”

_Do you want to talk about it?_

No, John realizes.

We’ll spend our lives walking along this ledge and never jumping, and if we sink our teeth in and carefully measure these foolish heroics, we may just get out alive.

There will be disappointments, guaranteed, and the idea ought to be much more off-putting.

John takes Sherlock’s face in his hands and kisses him deeply.

By this twist in the passage of time, we have come to find the notion of love.

May tomorrow’s weather be fair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What the hell kind of ending is that, there's like, zero closure. Correct! This multichapter clusterfuck started out as a writing exercise about how it feels to live with retrograde amnesia (which I do) (that's the one where you've forgotten everything prior to a certain point) and then accidentally grew a plot somewhere in the middle, but I still didn't want to make anything finite or eliminate any possible interpretations of the future (or the past) because all are valid in this nightmare wasteland of a story.


End file.
